05.14.17

Back in June 2016 there was considerably excitement around ViaSat’s sole source $73M contract to provide connectivity for Air Force One and other senior leadership aircraft. The plan was to replace Boeing’s Ku-band BBSN (which has continued to operate ever since the commercial Connnexion-by-Boeing project was cancelled in 2006) with a dual Ka/Ku-band solution which could utilize the ViaSat Ka-band satellites within their coverage footprint and then switch back to Ku-band in other parts of the world.

I’m told that one reason this upgrade happened was that President Obama’s daughters complained that the connectivity on Air Force One compared unfavorably to the speeds available on other ViaSat-equipped aircraft they had flown on, and ViaSat ultimately received a sole source contract, with the US government purchasing a couple of dozen of ViaSat’s dual Ku/Ka antennas in addition to the airtime contract.

But I’ve heard rumors that the RF performance of this Ku/Ka antenna failed the WGS compatibility tests required by the Air Force, and so to date the US government has not installed these new terminals, and Air Force One is apparently still operating with the old Boeing system. Its unclear what the end result will be, or if this is an easily solvable problem, but ViaSat’s competitors (especially Inmarsat, which has successfully leased GX capacity to the DoD for manned surveillance missions in the Middle East) are now rubbing their hands with glee.

[UPDATE 5/15] A spokesperson for ViaSat states that this rumor “is inaccurate. ViaSat is on target with our testing and deliverables, per our DISA contract.”

The broader prospects for ViaSat’s Ku/Ka antenna also appear uncertain, with the only commercial customer to date being Virgin America, which is using a handful of terminals on its Hawaii routes. Virgin America’s new owner, Alaska Airlines, has announced its intention to replace its existing Gogo ATG solution with a high speed satellite solution, but some now think that Gogo’s recent lease of the AMC-4 satellite for Pacific coverage means it will win this business with 2Ku.

Its interesting to note that Gilat has also developed a Ku/Ka antenna, which Hughes will offer for roaming outside its own Ka-band coverage footprint. Will this antenna be better than ViaSat’s solution, and more broadly will a combined Ku and Ka antenna (which inevitably has a smaller aperture and more beam skew problems) be a realistic alternative to high performance flat panels like Gogo’s 2Ku? The answer to that question will dictate whether ViaSat and Hughes can provide competition in the long haul passenger aircraft market over the next few years, or whether Panasonic, Gogo and Inmarsat will continue to dominate that segment until all three ViaSat-3 satellites are launched in the early 2020s, by which time most airlines will already have made their choice of provider.

02.28.17

Today’s announcement that SoftBank is investing $1.7B in Intelsat as part of a merger between Intelsat and OneWeb is eerily reminiscent of SoftBank’s investment in Sprint and subsequent purchase of Clearwire back in 2012-13. Then the motivation was acquisition of large amounts of 2.5GHz spectrum to be used with innovative small cells to revolutionize the cellular market. Today the motivation is acquisition of large amounts of NGSO spectrum to be used with innovative small satellites to revolutionize the satellite market.

There are certainly many synergies between Intelsat and OneWeb: Intelsat needs a next generation plan beyond Epic, to lower the cost of its capacity, and hamstrung by debt, it could not have afforded to build a new system on its own. OneWeb needs distribution and market access, as well as interim capacity so that it does not have to wait until the LEO system is fully deployed. So this deal makes a lot of sense, if you believe, as Masa clearly does, that new constellations will dramatically boost the future prospects for the satellite industry. On the other hand, if it doesn’t work out, would SoftBank get to the point where it is prepared to sell the assets and not even mention them in its vision of the future?

However, another potential parallel is that back in 2013, SoftBank faced a lengthy challenge from DISH, which mounted a bid for Clearwire and later made an offer for all of Sprint, and ultimately forced Masa to pay far more for Clearwire than he had hoped. Now EchoStar, which had made a $50M investment in OneWeb (then WorldVu) back in 2015, but has been far less prominently involved in OneWeb’s development efforts compared to Qualcomm (with DISH even objecting to OneWeb’s use of the MVDDS spectrum), has apparently seen its mooted partnership with SES put on hold.

Clearly Charlie Ergen needs to find a way forward for EchoStar to compete in the satellite broadband market on a global basis, building on the successful launch (and market lead) of Jupiter-2. Some analysts have been reiterating that this could involve a bid for Inmarsat, as I mentioned last summer, but the time for that has probably passed. So does Ergen use this development to revive the mooted SES deal, because SES will now need to compete more aggressively with Intelsat? Or does he want to be more actively engaged with OneWeb and get a larger slice of that development effort (and potentially use its capacity in the longer term)?

Either way it would not be surprising if DISH or EchoStar already holds some of Intelsat’s debt, and Ergen could even seek to maximize his leverage by acquiring a larger position in the company. Does Masa want a cooperative relationship with Ergen going forward (perhaps even with a view to collaboration between DISH and Sprint in the wireless sector), or is he still upset over what happened in 2013? And returning to the theme of Groundhog Day, will this movie end with the two protagonists eventually falling in love, or will we see a repeat of 2013, with yet another battle between Masa and Charlie?

11.09.16

Yesterday was an eventful day, not only for the US as a whole, but also for the inflight connectivity sector when both ViaSat and GEE announced their quarterly results at the same time. We’ve all been waiting for Southwest Airlines to make a decision about their future connectivity choices, so when ViaSat announced that “Subsequent to the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2017 (i.e. since September 30), ViaSat was selected by a North American airline to retrofit more than 500 aircraft from its existing, mainline domestic fleet with ViaSat’s highly advanced in-flight internet system” it was natural to assume that this was Southwest.

However, GEE has now denied that the ViaSat’s new customer is Southwest and when asked about the progress of the Southwest RFP on their results call, GEE stated that investors should “stay tuned” for an announcement but that GEE “expect[s] to continue to enhance the product and services that we provide at Southwest. And our expectation that we will remain a major customer of our connectivity business well beyond the current commitments.”

What this doesn’t say is that GEE is likely to retain anything like its current business with Southwest, indeed this statement is eerily reminiscent of Gogo’s assertion in February that it hoped to “retain a strong and lasting relationship” with American, when American ultimately split its orders between Gogo and ViaSat. And a conclusion to the Southwest competition appears imminent, with either Panasonic or ViaSat expected to capture a major share of Southwest’s fleet. Panasonic certainly think they are still in the game, but others (not just ViaSat itself) appear to believe ViaSat is now in the lead on the back of aggressive terminal pricing.

So what did ViaSat actually announce? Most have assumed that if it wasn’t Southwest, it must be the outstanding mainline aircraft at American Airlines, which American has the option to move away from Gogo’s ATG service. But those orders were expected to be decided in two separate batches and not necessarily in the immediate future, since American has still not even received the first installations for either of the existing contracts with Gogo 2Ku and ViaSat.

UPDATE: So its a big surprise that American has now confirmed that it will be moving essentially all of its mainline fleet to ViaSat (other than the pending 2Ku installations). I had wondered if the order might instead be for upgrades at United (where ViaSat already serves 360 planes) combined with United’s rumored pending order for 100-120 new planes. And that might very well still be another win for ViaSat in the next month or two.

FURTHER UPDATE: Back in late May, Gogo signed a term sheet with American Airlines which specified that its “terms will form the basis for transition to a new unified agreement to be negotiated in an effort to sign no later than October 1st, 2016.” Curiously, Gogo’s Q3 10-Q filed on November 3, makes no mention of a new agreement being signed with American Airlines either before or after the end of the quarter, which raises the question of exactly what is the status of this relationship right now, and whether the companies were unable to finalize the agreement because American decided to move the remaining mainline aircraft off Gogo’s ATG network without making any further commitment to 2Ku. However, we may not get much clarity on this issue for some time, perhaps not until Gogo’s Q4 report at the end of February.

Sorry I jumped the gun on Southwest, but things still look bad for GEE, and may in fact be even better for ViaSat than I expected if they win both American and much of Southwest’s fleet, not to mention another possible win for 100+ new planes and 360 upgrades at United.

In the meantime, we face more intrigue with respect to SmartSky and Gogo’s unlicensed ATG plans, with Microsoft filing with the FCC for tests to “develop channel models for air-to-ground operations in the 2.4 GHz ISM band” and to “examine various techniques that might minimize the potential for the air-to-ground link to disrupt Wi-Fi communications on the ground in the area surrounding the ground station.”

After Microsoft tested Globalstar’s proposed TLPS solution (which incidentally may have been administered the coup de grace by Trump’s win last night) and claimed a “profound negative impact,” it would not be in the least surprising if they now propose that the FCC should commence a rulemaking on where these ATG ground stations should be located (presumably not in the vicinity of Xboxes!), similar to the work on LTE-U (which also complies with existing FCC rules for unlicensed spectrum).

While those rules would not necessarily prevent deployment (ATG ground stations would simply be located in rural areas away from other buildings), any rulemaking could result in delays of 1-2 years before the network can be deployed. The consequence of that would potentially be to accelerate the migration of mainline commercial aircraft away from ATG and towards satellite solutions, in order to free up more capacity on Gogo’s network for smaller aircraft and business jets.

Overall, my concerns about continued ruinous competition in the inflight connectivity market have now been amplified further. Inmarsat has achieved key wins with Norwegian and IAG, which have put it firmly back in the game. ViaSat continues to grow its market share and now GEE’s refocusing on China and new investment from ShareCo could allow it to continue to compete in some international markets as well. Thales may be able to take JetBlue away from ViaSat (as Inmarsat suggested at its Capital Markets Day last month) and move these aircraft onto AMC-15/16 and ultimately SES-17. And Gogo and Panasonic still have a massive backlog of orders to work through. So despite all the talk of potential consolidation, it looks like airlines (and hopefully passengers) will continue to benefit from terminal subsidies, lower wholesale session costs and increasing bandwidth for some time to come.

11.02.16

Earlier this year I warned that the satellite industry seemed to be stepping off the precipice, as a Ku HTS price war culminated in the very attractive pricing (of around $1000 per MHz per month) that Gogo and Panasonic secured from SES in February 2016. What has followed over the last six months or so has been rampant negativity in the press about overcapacity and price crashes. Even NSR, who in March were noting the “generally slow and stable downward pressure on pricing up to 2016″ are now asserting that “satellite capacity pricing [is] in a prolonged freefall for most applications.”

In reality, the last six months have seen the first signs of stabilization in satellite capacity pricing, as SES and Intelsat pull back somewhat from their price war which was the proximate cause of the dramatic price declines seen from late 2014 through early 2016. In particular, SES predicted a “strong growth outlook” at its June investor day and presented a slide at the GCA Summit earlier that month showing three Ka-band HTS GEO satellites for global coverage. One of the ways SES was expected to deliver on this strategy was by “focusing on value-added, end-to-end solutions” in each of its verticals.

Its therefore interesting to see the contrast between Gogo’s assertion at its investor day on September 29 that there will be an “ample and diverse supply” of Ku-band capacity (totaling nearly 1Tbps globally by 2019) with Inmarsat’s position a week later that “Ku-band supply could be limited,” especially in North America.

At this point in time, it looks like the “unexpected softness” of satellite orders in 2016, caused by fears about a price crash will mean very few new C- or Ku-band GEO satellites being ordered in the near future without an anchor tenant. Panasonic may well follow Thales’ lead with its XTS satellites, but that won’t result in any (let alone “ample”) incremental supply for Gogo. And Gogo is not in a position to order a dedicated Ku-band satellite of its own to provide more capacity on top of its existing commitments.

Operators may well be justified in fearing dramatic erosion in pricing from new Ka-band satellites with hundreds of Gbps of capacity, but outside North America, there simply won’t be any of that capacity available before 2020. As a result, stabilization of pricing (albeit at considerably lower levels than those in historic contracts, many of which still need to be rolled over) seems plausible for 2017-18.

Instead I’m much more worried about whether substantial growth in revenue really will be stimulated by these lower prices. TIM Brazil (which is one of Intelsat’s biggest customers for cellular backhaul) is a good example, with their move to Epic Ku-band capacity giving them three times the capacity (partly from improved bps/Hz efficiency) compared to their previous C-band solution, with no increase in spending. And at least part of the fall in enterprise revenues seen by Intelsat and SES in the last two years appears to be due to less bandwidth being used by these customers, rather than simply price declines on existing (let alone incremental) capacity.

Some of that reduction in capacity utilization may be due to more efficient modems, which could be a one-off effect, but I believe that the question of demand elasticity (in the face of competition from terrestrial alternatives) is going to be much more important challenge for the satellite market in 2017 and 2018 than a supposed “freefall” in bandwidth prices. If satellite operators can identify untapped opportunities where they can be competitive with terrestrial, as O3b has done in various Pacific islands, or where there is substantial demand elasticity as passengers create on commercial airplanes and cruise ships, then revenue growth will result.

But if spend is relatively inelastic, as seems plausible for many enterprise VSAT (and perhaps some government) customers, then terrestrial competition may lead to continued market erosion. The biggest wild card is cellular backhaul: huge amounts of capacity are needed as mobile operators move from 2G to 3G to 4G in developing countries, so if these terrestrial players commit to satellite, there could be substantial revenue upside. On the other hand, if mobile operators focus on microwave as their backhaul solution of choice in Africa and Asia, it will be much more difficult to achieve significant growth in the satellite business.

However, even that reduced target may require extra spectrum to achieve, with ViaSat asking the FCC in late May for permission to use 600MHz of additional spectrum in the LMDS band. Fundamentally this appears to be due to the reduced efficiency that ViaSat now expects to achieve relative to that set out in its original beamhopping patent. The patent suggested that for a ViaSat-2 design (with only 1.5GHz of spectrum, rather than the 2.1GHz ViaSat now intends to use), the efficiency could be as high as 3bps/Hz on the forward link (i.e. 225Gbps) and 1.8bps/Hz on the return link (i.e. 135Gbps) for a total of 360Gbps of capacity. But at Satellite 2016, ViaSat’s CEO indicated that an efficiency (apparently averaged between the forward and return links) of only 1.5bps/Hz should be expected, no better than existing HTS Ka-band satellites and nearly 40% lower than ViaSat originally estimated.

A notable side-effect of this additional spectrum utilization (even assuming approval is granted by the FCC) is that new terminals will be required, including replacement of both the antenna and the modem for aircraft that want to make use of the extended coverage of ViaSat-2. That’s why American Airlines is waiting until the second half of 2017 for this new terminal to be developed, before it starts to install ViaSat’s connectivity on new aircraft.

While the FCC’s Spectrum Frontiers Order yesterday does contemplate continued use of the LMDS band for satellite gateways (though utilization by user terminals appears more difficult), it looks like other Ka-band providers intend to shift more of their future gateway operations up to the Q/V-band, rather than building hundreds of Ka-band gateways as ViaSat will need for its ViaSat-3 satellite. That decision could reduce the costs of competing ground segment deployments substantially, while retaining continuity for user links. Thus, as a result of the lower than expected beamhopping efficiency, it remains to be seen whether ViaSat’s technology will now be meaningfully superior to that of competitors, notably SES and Inmarsat who both appear poised to invest heavily in Ka-band.

SES gave a presentation at the Global Connected Aircraft Summit last month, depicting its plans to build three new Ka-band HTS satellites for global coverage as shown above, and the first of these satellites could be ordered very shortly, because as SES pointed out in its recent Investor Day presentation, it has EUR120M of uncommitted capex this year and nearly EUR1.5B available in the period through 2020.

Meanwhile Inmarsat is hard at work designing a three satellite Inmarsat-7 Ka-band system, with in excess of 100Gbps of capacity per satellite. Although the results of the Brexit referendum may complicate its efforts, Inmarsat is hoping to secure a substantial European Commission investment later this year, which would replace the four proposed Ka-band satellites that Eutelsat had previously contemplated building using Juncker fund money.

So now it appears we face (at least) a three way fight for the global Ka-band market, with deep-pocketed rivals sensing that ViaSat may not have all the technological advantages it had expected and Hughes poised to secure at least a 6 month (and possibly as much as a 9-12 month) lead to market for Jupiter-2 compared to ViaSat-2. Victory for ViaSat is far from certain, and perhaps even doubtful, but beyond 2020 Ka-band therefore appears very likely to be the dominant source of GEO HTS capacity.

05.14.16

Back in March I noted that the Satellite 2016 industry conference “felt like 2000, as attendees peer over the edge of the precipice.” Yesterday, it seems the industry stepped off into the void, as Eutelsat’s profit warning proved to be the catalyst for a wholesale re-evaluation of the outlook for FSS/HTS data services.

Everyone is worrying about capacity pricing, where according to Eutelsat’s CEO “the outlook for data delivery is bad.” Just how bad hasn’t been obvious to many observers, not least Northern Sky Research, who in March dismissed suggestions that the sky is falling and instead claimed that so far there has only been “generally slow and stable downward pressure on pricing up to 2016″ though these drops were “expected to continue to gather steam.” Moody’s struck a similar positive note about European satellite operators in January, suggesting that “A Rebound in Revenue Growth, Stable Margins and Plateauing Capex to Support Credit Quality in 2016.”

In reality, a look at some of the largest deals shows just how much of a price decline has already taken place. Traditional wide beam transponders have been priced at $3000-$4000 per MHz per month, which made Intelsat’s offer to IS-29 anchor tenants in 2012 of about $2000 per MHz per month look like a bargain (Intelsat said it leased 20% of the capacity, i.e. about 2GHz, for $50M p.a.).

However, in February 2016, Gogo struck a deal with SES for “several GHz of both widebeam and spotbeam capacity in total” on its new SES-14 and 15 HTS satellites, followed by another agreement with Intelsat and OneWeb in early March. Gogo’s latest 10-Q has now revealed the impact of those agreements which represent commitments “to purchase transponder and teleport satellite services totaling approximately $29.5 million in 2016 (April 1 through December 31), $41.9 million in 2017, $40.4 million in 2018, $45.3 million in 2019, $58.6 million in 2020 and $309.2 million thereafter.”

Although the split between Intelsat and SES is not given, its a fairly good bet that they will be paid roughly equal amounts in 2020 and beyond. This is consistent with Intelsat renewing and extending its existing contract with more capacity being delivered at about the same revenue level (Intelsat claimed last September it had an 73% share of the aeronautical satellite communications market and Gogo had $37M of lease obligations in 2016 before these deals were struck) and also consistent with the Intelsat deal running through Dec 31, 2023 (as stated in the 8-K) and the SES deal running for “ten years from the applicable commencement of service date” for the SES-14/15 satellites (implying 7-8 years of the respective terms remaining in Jan 2021).

So if SES is leasing at least 2GHz of bandwidth to Gogo, which is the minimum amount consistent with the use of the word “several”, then the price of this capacity is no more than ~$1200 per MHz per month, and very plausibly the price may be as low as $1000 per MHz per month if Gogo is leasing say 2.5GHz. Given that the deal also represents a combination of wide beam and spot beam capacity, it certainly seems that SES’s HTS spot beam capacity is now being leased in (very!) large quantities for as little as $1000 per MHz per month, about 50% less than Intelsat’s original IS-29 deals.

That makes it pretty clear why Eutelsat has decided to step away from the HTS Ku table and limit its HTS investment “to providing broadband access to consumers and small businesses”, presumably via its European and African Ka-band satellites (and its partnership with ViaSat). Back in March I also suggested we could be in for a re-run of 2001 with “a sharp fall in satellite orders” and Eutelsat has confirmed there will now be a “downward review of our capital expenditures”.

So what comes next? Intelsat has just ordered a 9-series replacement satellite (a necessary step given that a large part of its C-band capacity reaches end of life in the next few years). But how much more Ku-band capacity is needed in the near term, given the looming threat of further price pressures from new Ka-band satellites like ViaSat-3? After all, despite large contracts with Gogo and Panasonic, there’s still a way to go just to fill up the HTS satellites that Intelsat and SES already have on order. And can Intelsat afford to match or beat SES’s price levels and still generate an adequate return on capital from the Epic satellites?

Most importantly, how much repricing is still to take place for existing Ku-band data services, and what will C-band users do if their C-band capacity becomes significantly more expensive than Ku (let alone Ka)? In addition, though Inmarsat believes (correctly) that its a very different company from Eutelsat, it has far more exposure to the data services business, and Inmarsat will now have to reconsider its pricing (and capacity provisioning) for GX services, as this low cost Ku HTS capacity impacts the aeronautical and maritime markets.

03.09.16

The Satellite 2016 conference this week has reminded me of years past. All the talk has been of ViaSat and their new ViaSat-3 1Tbps high throughput satellite (depicted above), just like in 2004 when Mark Dankberg used his Satellite Executive of the Year speech to describe his ambitions to build a 100Gbps satellite. Unlike back then (when most dismissed Dankberg’s plans as pie-in-the-sky), ViaSat’s announcement has already caused some large investment decisions by major operators to be postponed, and re-evaluated or perhaps even cancelled. Indeed the entire industry seems frozen like a deer in the headlights, trying to decide which way to run.

Some competitors, like Inmarsat, have chosen to portray ViaSat-3 as a “mythical beast” and ViaSat’s current offering of free streaming video on JetBlue as a “marketing stunt”. However, its far more serious than that. One perceptive observer suggested to me that its like competing for the presidency against Donald Trump: how do you respond to a competitor who is clearly intelligent and has a plan to win, but deliberately says things that fundamentally contradict your (supposedly rational) world view.

In the satellite industry the prevailing world view is that (at least in the foreseeable future) there is no need to build 1Tbps satellites offering capacity at $100/Mbps/mo, because satellite broadband will never compete directly with terrestrial and capture tens of millions of subscribers. But if ViaSat is determined to blow up the industry, most current business plans for two-way data applications (including essentially all Ku-band data services) are simply no longer viable. And if competitors remain frozen (or worse still dismissive) in response to ViaSat’s plans, then ViaSat will gain a head start on building these new higher capacity satellites.

In addition to this overarching theme, several other nuggets of information emerged: Inmarsat is acquiring a seventh “GX payload” by taking over Telenor’s Thor-7 Ka-band payload in Europe on a long term lease, presumably at a very attractive rate (perhaps even approaching the Eutelsat-Facebook-Spacecom deal price of ~$1M/Gbps/year, given Telenor’s lack of Ka-band customers). And Globalstar now appears to have a roughly 60%-70% chance of getting FCC approval for TLPS in the next couple of months, given the FCC’s desire to set a precedent of protection for existing unlicensed services that can be used in the upcoming LTE-U rulemaking. However, it appears that any deal would require a compromise of 200mW power limits (the maximum level demonstrated to date) and sharing of Globalstar’s L-band spectrum above 1616MHz with Iridium.

Going back to the title of this post, if last year’s conference felt like 1999, with exuberance about multiple new satellite projects, this year felt like 2000, as attendees peer over the edge of the precipice. Following on from that, next year could be like 2001, with pain to be shared all around the industry: a sharp fall in satellite orders, as operators re-evaluate the feasibility of their planned satellites, a continuing fall in prices, and the possibility of stranded capacity, either at operators, who are unable to sell their growing inventory of HTS capacity, or at distributors, who entered into contracts for capacity leases at prices far above current market rates.

11.10.15

Inmarsat has certainly had a great deal of success in the last two months, winning key contracts with the US Navy, Lufthansa and most recently Singapore Airlines, as well as a strategic partnership with Deutsche Telekom to built out its S-band European Aviation Network. While some of these wins may be a direct result of what Inmarsat refers to as “success-based capex” (otherwise known as giving away free terminals), these deals certainly have the potential to provide a significant boost to the company’s revenue growth outlook.

Moreover, it seems that the biggest deal is yet to come, as Inmarsat hinted on its results call last week that “customers in different regions [are] vying to have the [fourth GX] satellite placed over their areas of interest” and the plan for this satellite is expected to be finalized before Inmarsat announces its Q4 results in early 2016. However, in practice there is one deal which is far and away the most likely outcome, and it appears these statements are simply a matter of Inmarsat trying to make sure that it still has some negotiating leverage.

That deal was clearly apparent during last month’s State Visit to the UK by Chinese President Xi Jinping, when the only British company he visited was Inmarsat. Inmarsat highlighted that one purpose was “to understand how Inmarsat is able to uniquely contribute to President Xi’s One Belt One Road (‘OBOR’) strategic vision through the provision of critical global mobile broadband connectivity services, including Inmarsat’s revolutionary new service, Global Xpress” and noted that “Inmarsat has already signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with China Transport Telecommunication & Information Centre (CTTIC) to establish a strategic partnership to deliver Inmarsat’s revolutionary Inmarsat-5 Global Xpress mobile satellite broadband communications connectivity throughout China and OBOR.”

I’m told that the original intention of President Xi’s visit, accompanied by HRH The Duke of York and the UK Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was to have a signing ceremony for the agreement to formalize this “strategic partnership” and that would involve a full lease of the fourth GX satellite to China. Unfortunately the final agreement required certain changes and therefore could not be completed in time.

However, assuming this deal can be completed, Inmarsat is likely to receive a further significant boost to its revenues. Given Chinese expectations are typically that they will receive lower prices than other countries, I’d expect the payments to Inmarsat for capacity could potentially be on the order of $100M p.a. (assuming the agreement is for 10+ years), depending on who covers the capex and opex costs for the new GX gateways in China. And China could then be in a position to provide free or subsidized satellite broadband capacity to adjacent countries in support of its geopolitical OBOR ambitions, just as Google and Facebook have been working to bring Internet access to developing countries.

Once this deal is done, Inmarsat can move onto ordering I6 satellites with both L-band and Ka-band capacity, in order to supplement the (somewhat limited) capacity of the initial GX constellation. But with Eutelsat apparently looking for French government backing to buy a 3-4 satellite Ka-band system, and ViaSat (not coincidentally) announcing the intention to build its own even bigger 1Tbps satellites, the race to add lower cost Ka-band capacity is far from over. More importantly, despite all the attention given to Ku-band HTS in the last year or two, its hard to agree with the statement Gogo made on its Q3 results call (after its GX distribution deal with Inmarsat was terminated) that “there are simply not enough Ka satellites now or for the foreseeable future to meet the needs of global aviation”.

09.14.15

Paris is the place to be in September for satellite industry gossip (though not the weather), and this year is no different. There’s been plenty of chatter already about the MSS sector, as people look forward to Inmarsat’s upcoming investor day on October 8. The company has seen some good news recently, displacing Intelsat General to win a large US Navy contract last week. However, Inmarsat’s aggressiveness on price is highlighted by the reduction in the total ceiling price from $543M last time around to only $450M over 5 years (which is in turn perhaps double the US Navy’s most likely spending profile). Though this contract should help Inmarsat show top line revenue growth in 2016 and beyond, a significant proportion of the capacity (in C, Ku and X-band) will have to be bought in from other players, limiting Inmarsat’s ability to make a profit.

However, the other main news about Inmarsat is that the company is expected to order its first I6 L-band satellite before the end of 2015, and it will include substantial additional Ka-band capacity to supplement the rather limited amount of capacity available on GX, even after the fourth GX satellite is launched in 2016 or 2017. That will likely mean a total capital expenditure of $450M-$500M, plausibly repeated once or twice more in the next few years, just to keep Inmarsat in the bandwidth race.

There’s also been some chatter about the FCC regulatory situation as it affects Globalstar, where a source confirms that my suppositions in June about the purpose of Globalstar’s change in tone to the FCC were correct and that a deal was on the table to approve terrestrial use just for Globalstar’s own MSS spectrum and not the wider 22MHz TLPS channel. However, this approval was only going to be for low power use, and would therefore not be of much import, except as a demonstration of regulatory progress.

Then after Jay Monroe met with several FCC Commissioners in late July he withdrew this potential compromise and insisted instead on full TLPS approval, presumably believing that if permission either to use the unlicensed spectrum or high power terrestrial use or the MSS band was treated as a separate, second stage of the process, a conclusion would be delayed for years, making it impossible for Globalstar to deploy or monetize its spectrum anytime soon.

So now it seems we are back to an impasse, and though Globalstar has recently added some additional information into the docket on an experimental deployment in Chicago, this documentation doesn’t provide quantitative information on (for example) the exact rise in bit error rates seen by services like Bluetooth, merely observing that no observable performance impact was noted. As a result, I believe it is unlikely that the FCC will feel able to rule on full TLPS approval anytime soon (i.e. this year).

Ironically, Globalstar’s consultants are also acting for LightSquared, and have proposed a similar program of tests for GPS interference, again based on a “KPI” criteria of observable degradation in performance, rather than actual quantified impact on the signal to noise ratio. Most observers seem to believe that LightSquared is no more likely to gain FCC approval for its plans than before, and that after the recent publication of the DOT test plan for their Adjacent Band Compatibility study, the FCC will wait for those tests to be conducted, which could take a considerable period of time.

Predictably LightSquared is already criticizing the DOT test plan, very likely setting us off on exactly the same well trodden (and ultimately disastrous) path as before. As a result, I’m sure that those hedge funds who committing funding to the bankruptcy plan (especially those in the $3B+ second lien, which sits behind $1.5B of first lien debt) must now be feeling pretty nervous. I wonder if any of them will now be frantically searching to see if they have any way to avoid funding these commitments once the FCC approves the transfer of control?

Finally, in yet more FCC-related news, the consensus here seems to be that the 14GHz ATG proceeding may also fail to reach a conclusion in the near term, as I predicted earlier this month, due to the uncertainty over how to protect NGSO systems. Instead, ViaSat’s Ka-band solution seems to be going from strength to strength, with the hugely positive reactions to the performance on JetBlue contributing to their recent win at Virgin America and to other airlines taking another look at what will be the best future-proof solution. All this makes Gogo’s predictions that its US market share is secure and that its revenue potential is “like a gazillion dollars” seem just as foolish as it sounds.

06.03.15

Despite the delays in the launch of GX, it seems Inmarsat may be looking to stitch up an even larger share of the maritime market in the near term. Rumors are flying that Inmarsat may soon make a formal bid to acquire KVH, the largest maritime VSAT player in terms of vessels (though not in revenues), adding about 3500 more terminals to Inmarsat’s existing 2200 VSAT equipped ships.

KVH generated nearly $80M from its miniVSAT business in 2014 with an average service ARPU of $1500 per month, compared to Inmarsat’s $90M and ARPU of $4000 including equipment leases (this equates to $2500 per month after stripping out hardware, according to Inmarsat’s most recent results call, which is a more appropriate point of comparison with the KVH ARPU).

The difference in ARPUs between Inmarsat’s current VSAT business and KVH is striking, in fact KVH’s smaller V3 terminal (which has about 900 active terminals) is generating around $500 in monthly ARPU, below even Inmarsat’s FleetBB ARPU of $700 (note that the standard FleetBB package sold by KVH now only provides 20 Mbytes per month of data for $749, whereas KVH offers airtime at rates as low as $0.99 per Mbyte).

If Inmarsat does move ahead with a KVH bid, it would likely be seen as a counter to Airbus’s disposal of its Vizada business unit, because Inmarsat would then have by far the largest number of VSAT-equipped ships. Indeed it would not be surprising to see attempts by competitors to block the deal on antitrust grounds, not to mention the concerns that current KVH customers will have about potential future price increases.

However, it would also be something of an acknowledgement that GX is optimally positioned as a lower end off-the-shelf maritime VSAT service (like KVH’s miniVSAT), as a step up from FleetBB, rather than as a high end solution for cruise ships and oil rigs. KVH’s growth has slowed in the last year, with terminal shipments staying at close to 1000 per year in 2012, 2013 and 2014, but net adds and ARPUs declining. Pressure from Inmarsat will only intensify, once the low cost 60cm GX antenna is available with global coverage, so this looks like it would be a good time for KVH to sell out.

Inmarsat investors will presumably also welcome a deal, with a much clearer path established to a GX maritime business of $200M+ in annual service revenues over the next few years (though its important to note this represents a retail service business, not the wholesale spend on satellite capacity). However, the obvious question that customers will ask is whether low end price packages will still be offered for miniVSAT users, or whether Inmarsat will move them up to much higher price points, as it has done with FleetBB over the last few years.

And what will be the alternative for these users: will it be other VSAT solutions, or will it be the new broadband services (comparable in capability to FleetBB) offered by Iridium’s NEXT constellation? It will take some time for either of these options to emerge, with low cost small Ku-band VSAT antennas needed for the former, and completion of the NEXT constellation needed for the latter. That provides a further motivation for Inmarsat to move sooner rather than later, while its freedom of action in the low end of the maritime market remains relatively unconstrained by competitive alternatives.